Should I hire an SEO consultant?

[DXL]

I've been designing sites for a few years, but the most I've been doing towards effective SEO is adding meta tags to my sites and setting up reciprocal links with people when possible. My own personal niche sites are indexed beautifully thanks to plenty of content and plenty of legitimate links.

One of my clients, a doctor's office, noticed that their placement in Google and Yahoo are extremely poor. I submitted their site to Google years ago, included meta tags, and that was that. I've never resubmitted info to search engines, or worked on getting them links. I plan on getting them involved with PPC services, but what they really want is good search engine results.

Should I just subcontract someone to do this work, or pay someone for a crash course on basic SEO? Or is all the info I need floating around WW? I'm patient and willing to read and learn, I just want to know if I should pay someone or try to find sites that help people with SEO info.

[abbeyvet]

what they really want is good search engine results

But is it really? What they really want is probably new clients and a better financial return on their website?

All the info you need is floating around WW, I doubt you need to hire anyone. However, getting them the positions they want in the natural serps may be time consuming and can come with no garauntees that you will acheive them or that they will last. It may be that they would be better concentrating on the PPC angle.

But whatever you do move them from thinking that position is the be all and end all, to realising that in fact ROI is.

[rakesh mosaic]

Hiring an SEO Consultant would really depend on what exactly is their objective besides just good rankings.

If you have time, then it would make sense to learn the hard way your self which would obviously benefit you as well in the long run.

But if your client really insist on getting results soon, I'd recommend hiring a SEO consultant which would really understand your objective and is NOT just after generating money for himself. :)

Also I've propose you to go for PPC campaign initially till your website starts ranking organically in Search Engines along with SEO campaign, so that till the time your website starts appearing in top results (through SEO), it would receive traffic through PPC campaign.

But really it is all your decisions.

[Lorel]

Before you hire anyone check out their client's sites and validate the home pages. Any client's site that doesn't validate doesn't say much for their SEO--the most basic of SEO practices..